Struggling to join the dots between systems theory, transcendental philosophy, aesthetics and other speculations.

Thursday, 7 March 2013

Why drawing is like phenomenology (and why I cant do it)

I’m not very good at drawing and any of my efforts to date have been pretty clumsy. The main reason as to why I can’t draw well
is that I haven’t learned to look in the appropriate style. David Hockney calls
this particular style of looking to draw “eyeballing” which he says is,

The way an artist sits
down in front of a sitter and draws or paints a portrait by using his hand and
eye alone and nothing else, looking at the figure and then trying to recreate
the likeness on the paper or canvas. By doing this he ‘gropes’ for the form he
sees before him. (Hockney 2006, p. 23)

Also, I can’t seem to make my hands do what I’d
like them to in order to make a satisfactory drawing. I don’t have the
technical facility to use the drawing materials effectively. In short, I don’t
have what Ernst Gombrich calls a “schema” for drawing.

A colleague once gave me a drawing lesson and I,
apparently, made the classic mistake when trying to draw an object. In this
case it was a beer glass. I first imagined the
immediate experience of the glass as a conceptual object, which in this case
was a transparent, open cylinder. I then attempted to rotate that cylinder in
my mind’s eye to bring it parallel with the picture surface in order to
represent it through drawing lines. The reason that this does not work as a
strategy for drawing is that it is the wrong style of looking. This style of
looking takes first hand expe­rience and attempts to mediate it conceptually
according to a pre-existent shape (such as a cylinder) before attempting to
re-present that shape according to the material of the drawing (pencil, paper
and so on) and parallel to a picture plane.

The successful
drawer, on the other hand, must attend to the specific experience of the object
as it is experienced. In short, they have to become a phenomenologist (even if they didn't know it.) They learn to attend to the gaps between things
and treat the spaces between elements as something rather than nothing. They
must then match their observations with a set of learned procedures and
physical actions. The good drawer uses their arms and hands and thumbs and
other parts of the body to relate the proportions of the viewed object to their
own body. They must bracket (put out of action) a conceptual consideration of
the object in favour of grasping its concrete particularity. The drawer must
then translate this experience into the medium they have to hand according to
the techniques they know.

I find such a style of “eyeballing” and close looking –
what I call the drawing style – actually very difficult to do. It is certainly
the case that this is not how I experience the world on a day to day basis
whereby my natural attitude to things is as something ready to hand to be used
or understood. I rarely attend to door frames or tables as significant
aesthetic experiences or perceptual conundrums. Even many works of art do not
present themselves in such a way too. Recently, for example, I spent a
considerable time looking at the Ghent Altarpiece or Adoration of the Mystic
Lamb by van Eyck and marvelling at its complex ico­nography of saints, patrons,
angels and so on. I was absorbed by the lustrous surfaces of oil paint. And
puzzled by its weirdness. But I did not imagine myself drawing it. I was not in
the drawing style of looking. There seemed to be too much going on, a surfeit
of richness perhaps, to allow for this.

Hi Adrian, the blog entry is taken from a paper (on drawing and Robert Morris) in De Preester (ed.) Moving Imagination: The Motor Dimension of Imagination in the Arts, (John Benjamins Publishing) - http://www.amazon.com/Moving-Imagination-dimension-imagination-Consciousness/dp/9027213569/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1363002041&sr=1-1&keywords=helena+de+preester

You can find the de Duve drawing in his paper in Halsall et al (ed), Rediscovering Aesthetics - there's a link to this on the right of my blog

About

I'm an art writer and academic who lectures in the history/ theory of modern and contemporary art at National College of Art & Design, Dublin where I'm Director (with Declan Long) of MA Art in the Contemporary World.

I'm currently involved with several projects related to the theme of “Systems Aesthetics.”